On The Wealth of Nations Quotes

“The complexity of economics can be calculated mathematically. Write out the algebraic equation that is the human heart and multiply each unknown by the population of the world.”
― P.J. O'Rourke, On The Wealth of Nations

“When Adam Smith was being incomprehensible he didn’t have the luxury of brief, snappy technical terms as a shorthand for incoherence.”
― P.J. O'Rourke, On The Wealth of Nations

“Any advice given to government, no matter how reasonable, intelligent, or well principled, has only one result—more government.”
― P.J. O'Rourke, On the Wealth of Nations

“It’s no wonder that many of the most admirable—and unmodern—people of the eighteenth century do not “come alive on the page” for us moderns. Meanwhile some of the less admirable, like Rousseau, come alive so well that they still need killing off today.”
― P.J. O'Rourke, On the Wealth of Nations

“What Smith wanted us to do was use our mental and physical capabilities to render the rulers of mankind as unnecessary and as inconsequential as possible, to leave them in their drafty castles throwing chicken bones on the floor.”
― P.J. O'Rourke, On the Wealth of Nations

“No nation ever voluntarily gave up the dominion of any province, how troublesome soever it might be to govern it.... Such sacrifices, though they might frequently be agreeable to the interest, are always mortifying to the pride of every nation, and what is perhaps of still greater consequence, they are always contrary to the private interest of the governing part of it, who would thereby be deprived of the disposal of many places of trust and profit, of many opportunities of acquiring wealth and distinction, which the possession of the most turbulent, and, to the great body of the people, the most unprofitable province seldom fails to afford.23”
― P.J. O'Rourke, On the Wealth of Nations

“The man of system ... is apt to be very wise in his own conceit; and is often so enamored with the supposed beauty of his own ideal plan of government, that he cannot suffer the smallest deviation from any part of it.... He seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess-board.”12 Barbed wire always seems to be needed to keep the chessmen on their squares.”
― P.J. O'Rourke, On the Wealth of Nations